Death in Venice Summary

Thomas Mann's initial inspiration for his novella, Death in Venice (1912), came from German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who fell in love with a teenage girl when he was seventy-four years old and vacationing in Marienbad. However, Mann's own trip to Venice supplied many of the details for the story. The story concerns Gustav von Aschenbach, an accomplished middle-aged writer who has dedicated his life to his art and the pursuit of beauty, and...

Encyclopedia Articles (2)

Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was born in the North German city of Lubeck. His father was a wealthy businessman and municipal leader. His mother was half-Portuguese; the dau...
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Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was born in the North German city of Lubeck. His father was a wealthy businessman and municipal leader. His mother was half-Portuguese; the da...
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Thomas Mann Biographies (3)

Thomas Mann is one of the most celebrated German writers in history, and he experienced this phenomenal acclaim within his own lifetime. In 1938, the year he left Europe for exile in the United States...
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The German novelist and essayist Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was perhaps the most influential and representative German author of his time.Born in the free Hanseatic city of Lübeck on the Baltic Sea,...
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Biography EssayThomas Mann is one of the most celebrated German writers in history, and he owes part of this fame to the United States, where he held citizenship when he died in 1955 at the age of eig...
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The purpose of this essay is to examine the conflict between rationality and irrationality in Death in Venice and to assess how this conflict is developed and possibly resolved. This conflict i...
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Throughout the novella, Death in Venice, Mann tells of the infatuation of the greatly respected, although ageing Gustav von Aschenbach for a young polish boy, Tadzio, who appears to von Aschenbach as ...
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